


Losing Time

by Shatteredsand



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mental Instability, POV Second Person, Self Harm, Stiles is not okay, Stiles is very not okay, and therefore triggering, disturbing imagery, if you want to look at it that way, implied sterek, unanswered questions, unclear ending, what could be considered
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-10
Updated: 2013-12-10
Packaged: 2018-01-04 06:49:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1077873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shatteredsand/pseuds/Shatteredsand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At some point, you realize that you aren't sleeping. You realize, at some point, that you turn off the light and lie down in your bed and close your eyes, but you don't actually sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Losing Time

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know how to explain this.

At some point, you realize that you aren't sleeping. You realize, at some point, that you turn off the lights and lie down in your bed and close your eyes, but you don't actually sleep.

You find yourself "waking up" halfway through first period, or driving to school, or making breakfast. At first, you tell yourself that you don't remember getting up and doing all the things that led to you doing what your doing then because you were tired and it was early or boring or any number of things. At some point, though, you realize that you haven't been sleeping. You haven't been sleeping in a long time now.

Words you don't remember writing have sneak into your notes. This is not unusual. Your mind wanders easily, and your classes are not the most interesting of subjects. But the words begin as a seemless transition, without any sign of hesitation or pause, from whatever you're supposed to be studying to random nonsense to desperate pleas you cannot understand to the next word in the lecture, with no accounting for what's been lost in the middle.

"in 1865 wake up wake up wake up this is you wake up what if they get in close the door wake up this is what you are what you have always been WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP WHAT IF THEY GET IN **_WAKE UP_** after which Lincoln died"

You remember writting the date, and you remember writing the event. Everything else is blank blackness, and you would blame it on falling asleep--it has been known to happen upon occasion--but you canot write in your sleep. And you have realized, at some point, that you haven't been sleeping for a long time now.

Sometimes, you "wake up" in the shower. You're shaking. Violent tremors that shudder through the whole of you. The water between your feet has the slightest tinge of orangeish-pink, and you run with werewolves; you know what blood looks like swirling down the drain. Your fingers are pruned and so, so clean. You spend seconds-minutes-hours searching for the truth hidden in the cracks of your palms, the truth clinging beneath your fingernails. But the truth is circling the drain, going-going-gone.

At some point, you realized you hadn't been been sleeping. At some point after that, you started gnawing on your fist. It hurts, so you know this isn't a long, unending dream. A terrible nightmare. You chew your knuckles until they bleed, the burst of wet copper sinking up to your gums and slipping into the lines between your teeth. The taste sticks to your tongue, a film of life and death, and you don't think you mind the taste half as much as you should.

You still don't know what happens when you should be sleeping but aren't. What happens when you think you're doing one thing only to find yourself doing another with no recollection of the inbetween. You can't remember how to ask for help.

You desperately want to ask for help.

Once, just once, before you'd realized that you hadn't been sleeping, you punched yourself in the face in an attempt to wake yourself up. You thought you were dreaming. You thought it was a nightmare you could leave. It didn't work, so you kept trying. Slamming your fist into your face, over and over and over again. You cut the inside of your cheek on your teeth, swallowed blood, kept going. The entire right side of your face had been bruised purple-black the next day, and no one asked you why. That's for the best really.

You can't remember what had been so horrible you'd wanted so badly to make it a dream.

It becomes more frequent, after your realization. The smeared-out loss of time. You are wearing a watch, a fancy one that tells you the date as well as time. Sometimes you lose days. You can't figure out where they went, but they're gone, and you are not where you left yourself. Sometimes, most times, you are not even in Beacon Hills.

The school calls your dad. Because you haven't been going. To school. Sometimes. A lot of times. You can't remember the last time you did, but that is normal now, not odd. The new normal of lost days and lost time. You're truent. You are failing every single one of your classes. You don't even remember what your classes are supposed to be this term. There is a chance that you will not graduate with your year, a good chance, if you don't get your act together.

This  make you laugh with a force just the wrong side of hysterical for several minutes, until the laughter is a panic-attack stealing all your air, and your father is at your side trying to talk you down. You can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe. When the darkness falls this time, it's the closest thing to sleep you've had in months.

You wake up in the hospital. Your dad is there, weighed down by the burden of your failure of well-being. By the burden of _you_. You start to chew on your fist, only to find soft gauze instead of mangled flesh. You switch hands. You have to be sure you're awake, even if you don't sleep, because _what if they get in_?

You don't know what you're afraid of, but you realize, at this point, that you are deathly afraid.

Your father takes your hand from your mouth, and you struggle. You struggle like a wounded animal, snapping your teeth at his hands and clawing at his arms, until people storm in and spill poison into your skin.

You sleep.

You "wake up". There is blood on your hands. There is blood everywhere. You are soaked and dripping red. The blood is two inches deep, and spanning the room, the halls. Everywhere you go, there is a never-ending puddle of crimson. You lick your lips and taste copper on your tongue, familiar and oddly soothing.

Lydia's banshee scream echoes throughout the hospital, but she isn't anywhere you look. Darting away every time you approach, a flash of fire-red hair as she rounds a corner and disappears. There are arrows in the walls. Embedded like shrapenel, like the remnents of a warzone, a battlefield. That might explain the blood then. Gouges in the drywall, rends in the metal, cracks in the linolemn. You can hear Scott, sometimes, in the breaks between Lydia's screeches. He tlks slowly and afraid, "this isn't you. this isn't you." You think he must be wrong, because you have never felt more like yourself.

A wolf howl layering with unearthly scream, a mix that should grate. It sounds like pack, and you feel safe despite what your eyes are showing you.

A blood-soaked leather jacket, sodden and ripped, discarded on the floor before you. You take it. You slip it on, and it feels like coming home in a way that makes no sense because it completely does. The wolves wear leather; that's their thing. But you run with wolves, and that means it can be your thing too.

Something ominious and dark tackles you to the ground and you stab upwrds, viciously, with the knife you hadn't even realized was in your hand. This blood, the blood that sprays out and drenches you all over again, is warm.

It makes you smile.

You wake up. You are screaming, and you cannot stop. There are people, nurses and doctors, administering drugs, shouting words your used to know.

This time, you do not sleep. You do not lose time.

This time Derek Hale tosses aside white-coats and scrubs like a man battling through an army, pins you by the throat until you can scarcely breathe, and roars your name. His eyes are blue now. Scott's the Alpha. This should be Scott. But it's Derek, and his eyes are blue, and this shouldn't work, but it does.

You go limp. Turn your head, expose your neck. Submissive behavior. Derek is not an Alpha. Derek was never technically your Alpha. This shouldn't work. But you submit, and the graze of Derek's too blunt, still human teeth across the skin of your neck wakes you up in a way you haven't been since that tub of icy water in Deaton's back room.

You don't know what that means.

You don't know if you want to.

"What..." You ask anyways, because that's what you do, you ask questions and find the answers. That's your job. It's how you help, but now you need the help, and who will ask the questions that you haven't been able to find the words for? But the world is closing in. Black at the edges, soft and welcoming, and...

You sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think....


End file.
